“I’ve been married for twenty years,” she replied, smiling.
“I beg your pardon, ma’am. The fact is he had a Malay girl living with him. I don’t know “ow long, ten or twelve years, I think. Well, when “e made up “is mind to come “ome for good she didn’t say nothing. She just sat there. He thought she’d carry on no end, but she didn’t. Of course “e provided for “er all right, “e gave “er a little “ouse for herself, an’ “e fixed it up so as so much should be paid “er every month. “E wasn’t mean, I will say that for “im, an’ she knew all along as “e’d be going some time. She didn’t cry or anything. When “e packed up all “is things and sent them off, she just sat there an’ watched “em go. And when “e sold “is furniture to the Chinks she never said a word. He’d give “er all she wanted. And when it was time for “im to go so as to catch the boat she just kep’ on sitting on the steps of the bungalow, you know, and she just looked an’ said nothing. He wanted to say good-bye to “er, same as anyone would, an’, would you believe it? she never even moved. ‘Aren’t you going to say good-bye to me?’ he says. A rare funny look come over “er face. And do you know what she says? ‘You go,’ she says; they “ave a funny way of talking, them natives, not like we “ave, ‘you go,’ she says, ‘but I tell you that you will never come to your own country. When the land sinks into the sea, death will come upon you, an’ before them as goes with you sees the land again, death will have took you.’ It gave me quite a turn.”
“What did Mr Gallagher say?” asked Mrs Hamlyn.
“Oh, well, you know what “e is. He just laughed. ‘Always merry and bright,’ “e says and “e jumps into the motor, an’ off we go.”
Mrs Hamlyn saw the bright and sunny road that ran through the rubber estates, with their trim green trees, carefully spaced, and their silence, and then wound its way up hill and down through the tangled jungle. The car raced on, driven by a reckless Malay, with its white passengers, past Malay houses that stood away from the road among the coconut trees, sequestered and taciturn, and through busy villages where the market-place was crowded with dark-skinned little people in gay sarongs. Then towards evening it reached the trim, modern town, with its clubs and its golf links, its well-ordered rest-house, its white people, and its railway-station, from which the two men could take the train to Singapore. And the woman sat on the steps of the bungalow, empty till the new manager moved in, and watched the road down which the car had panted, watched the car as it sped on, and watched till at last it was lost in the shadow of the night.
“What was she like?” Mrs Hamlyn asked.
“Oh, well, to my way of thinking them Malay women are all very much alike, you know,” Pryce answered. “Of course she wasn’t so young any more, and you know what they are, them natives, they run to fat something terrible.”
“Fat?”
The thought, absurdly enough, filled Mrs Hamlyn with dismay. “Mr Gallagher was always one to do himself well, if you understand what I mean.”
The idea of corpulence at once brought Mrs Hamlyn back to common sense. She was impatient with herself because for an instant she had seemed to accept the little cockney’s suggestion.
“It’s perfectly absurd, Mr Pryce. Fat women can’t throw spells on people at a distance of a thousand miles. In fact life is very difficult for a fat woman anyway.”
“You can laugh, miss, but unless something’s done, you mark my words, the governor’s for it. And medicine ain’t goin’ to save him, not white man’s medicine.”
“Pull yourself together, Mr Pryce. This fat lady had no particular grievance against Mr Gallagher. As these things are done in the East he seems to have treated her very well. Why should she wish him any harm?”
“We don’t know “ow they look at things. Why, a man can live there for twenty years with one them natives, and d’you think “e knows what’s goin’ on in that black heart of hers? Not “im!”
She could not smile at his melodramatic language, for his intensity was impressive. And she knew, if anyone did, that the hearts of men, whether their skins are yellow or white or brown, are incalculable.
“But even if she felt angry with him, even if she hated him and wanted to kill him, what could she do?” It was strange that Mrs Hamlyn with her questions was trying now, unconsciously, to reassure herself. “There’s no poison that could start working after six or seven days.”
“I never said it was poison.”
“I’m sorry, Mr Pryce,” she smiled, “but I’m not going to believe in a magic spell, you know.”
“You’ve lived in the East?”
“Off and on for twenty years.”
“Well, if you can say what they can do and what they can’t, it’s more than I can.” He clenched his fist and beat it on the rail with sudden, angry violence. “I’m fed up with the bloody country. It’s got on my nerves, that’s what it is. We’re no match for them, us white men, and that’s a fact. If you’ll excuse me I think I’ll go an’ “ave a tiddley. I’ve got the jumps.”
He nodded abruptly and left her. Mrs Hamlyn watched him, a sturdy, shuffling little man in a shabby khaki, slither down the companion into the waist of the ship, walk across it with bent head, and disappear into the second-class saloon. She did not know why he left with her a vague uneasiness. She could not get out of her mind that picture of a stout woman, no longer young, in a sarong, a coloured jacket, and gold ornaments, who sat on the steps of a bungalow looking at an empty road. Her heavy face was painted, but in her large, tearless eyes there was no expression. The men who drove in the car were like schoolboys going home for the holidays. Gallagher gave a sigh of relief. In the early morning, under the bright sky, his spirits bubbled. The future was like a sunny road that wandered through a wide-flung, wooded plain.
Later in the day Mrs Hamlyn asked the doctor how his patient did. The doctor shook his head.
“I’m done. I’m at the end of my tether.” He frowned unhappily. “It’s rotten luck, striking a case like this. It would be bad enough at home, but on board ship …”
He was an Edinburgh man, but recently qualified, and he was taking his voyage as a holiday before settling down to practice. He felt himself aggrieved. He wanted to have a good time and, faced with this mysterious illness, he was worried to death. Of course he was inexperienced, but he was doing everything that could be done and it exasperated him to suspect that the passengers thought him an ignorant fool.
“Have you heard what Mr Pryce thinks?” asked Mrs Hamlyn.
“I never heard such rot. I told the captain and he’s right up in the air. He doesn’t want it talked about. He thinks it’ll upset the passengers.”
“I’ll be as silent as the grave.”
The surgeon looked at her sharply.
“Of course you don’t believe that there can be any truth in nonsense of that sort?” he asked.
“Of course not.” She looked out at the sea, which shone, blue and oily and still, all round them. “I’ve lived in the East a long time,” she added. “Strange things happen there.”
“This is getting on my nerves,” said the doctor.
Near them two little Japanese gentlemen were playing deck quoits. They were trim and neat in their tennis shirts, white trousers, and buckram shoes. They looked very European, they even called the score to one another in English, and yet somehow to look at them filled Mrs Hamlyn at that moment with a vague disquiet. Because they seemed to wear so easily a disguise there was about them something sinister. Her nerves too were on edge.
And presently, no one quite knew how, the notion spread through the ship that Gallagher was bewitched. While the ladies sat about on their deck-chairs, stitching away at the costumes they were making for the fancy-dress party on Christmas Day, they gossiped about it in undertones, and the men in the smoking-room talked of it over their cocktails. A good many of the passengers had lived long in the East and from the recesses of their memory they produced strange and inexplicable stories. Of course it was absu
rd to think seriously that Gallagher was suffering from a malignant spell, such things were impossible, and yet this and that was a fact and no one had been able to explain it. The doctor had to confess that he could suggest no cause for Gallagher’s condition, he was able to give a physiological explanation, but why these terrible spasms should have suddenly assailed him he did not say. Feeling vaguely to blame, he tried to defend himself.
“Why, it’s the sort of case you might never come across in the whole of your practice,” he said. “It’s rotten luck.”
He was in wireless communication with passing ships, and suggestions for treatment came from here and there.
“I’ve tried everything they tell me,” he said irritably. “The doctor of the Japanese boat advised adrenalin. How the devil does he expect me to have adrenalin in the middle of the Indian Ocean?”
There was something impressive in the thought of this ship speeding through a deserted sea, while to her from all parts came unseen messages. She seemed at that moment strangely alone and yet the centre of the world. In the lazaret the sick man, shaken by the cruel spasms, gasped for life. Then the passengers became conscious that the ship’s course was altered, and they heard that the captain had made up his mind to put in at Aden. Gallagher was to be landed there and taken to the hospital, where he could have attention which on board was impossible. The chief engineer received orders to force his engines. The ship was an old one and she throbbed with the greater effort. The passengers had grown used to the sound and feel of her engines, and now the greater vibration shook their nerves with a new sensation. It would not pass into each one’s unconsciousness, but beat on their sensibilities so that each felt a personal concern. And still the wide sea was empty of traffic, so they seemed to traverse an empty world. And now the uneasiness which had descended upon the ship, but which no one had been willing to acknowledge, became a definite malaise. The passengers grew irritable, and people quarrelled over trifles which at another time would have seemed insignificant. Mr Jephson made his hackneyed jokes, but no one any longer repaid him with a smile. The Linsells had an altercation, and Mrs Linsell was heard late at night walking round the deck with her husband and uttering in a low, tense voice a stream of vehement reproaches. There was a violent scene in the smoking-room one night over a game of bridge, and the reconciliation which followed it was attended with general intoxication. People talked little of Gallagher, but he was seldom absent from their thoughts. They examined the route map. The doctor said now that Gallagher could not live more than three or four days, and they discussed acrimoniously what was the shortest time in which Aden could be reached. What happened to him after he was landed was no affair of theirs; they did not want him to die on board.
Mrs Hamlyn saw Gallagher every day. With the suddenness with which after tropical rain in the spring you seem to see the herbage grow before your very eyes, she saw him go to pieces. Already his skin hung loosely on his bones, and his double chin was like the wrinkled wattle of a turkey-cock. His cheeks were sunken. You saw now how large his frame was, and through the sheet under which he lay his bony structure was like the skeleton of a prehistoric giant. For the most part he lay with his eyes closed, torpid with morphia, but shaken still with terrible spasms, and when now and again he opened his eyes they were preternaturally large; they looked at you vaguely, perplexed and troubled, from the depths of their bony sockets. But when, emerging from his stupor, he recognized Mrs Hamlyn, he forced a gallant smile to his lips.
“How are you, Mr Gallagher?” she said.
“Getting along, getting along. I shall be all right when we get out of this confounded heat. Lord, how I look forward to a dip in the Atlantic. I’d give anything for a good long swim. I want to feel the cold grey sea of Gal way beating against my chest.”
Then the hiccup shook him from the crown of his head to the sole of his feet. Mr Pryce and the stewardess shared the care of him. The little cockney’s face wore no longer its look of impudent gaiety, but instead was sullen.
“The captain sent for me yesterday,” he told Mrs Hamlyn when they were alone. “He gave me a rare talking to.”
“What about?”
“He said “e wouldn’t “ave all this hoodoo stuff. He said it was frightening the passengers and I’d better keep a watch on me tongue or I’d “ave “im to reckon with. It’s not my doing. I never said a word except to you and the doctor.”
“It’s all over the ship.”
“I know it is. D’you think it’s only me that’s saying it? All them Lascars and the Chinese, they all know what’s the matter with him. You don’t think you can teach them much, do you? They know it ain’t a natural illness.”
Mrs Hamlyn was silent. She knew through the amahs of some of the passengers that there was no one on the ship, except the whites, who doubted that the woman whom Gallagher had left in distant Selantan was killing him with her magic. All were convinced that as they sighted the barren rocks of Arabia his soul would be parted from his body.
“The captain says if he hears of me trying any hanky-panky he’ll confine me to my cabin for the rest of the voyage,” said Pryce, suddenly, a surly frown on his puckered face.
“What do you mean by hanky-panky?”
He looked at her for a moment fiercely as though she too were an object of the anger he felt against the captain.
“The doctor’s tried every damned thing he knows, and he’s wirelessed all over the place, and what good “as “e done? Tell me that. Can’t “e see the man’s dying? There’s only one way to save him now.”
“What do you mean?”
“It’s magic what’s killing “im, and it’s only magic what’ll save him. Oh, don’t say it can’t be done. I’ve seen it with me own eyes.” His voice rose, irritable and shrill. “I’ve seen a man dragged from the jaws of death, as you might say, when they got in a pawang, what we call a witch-doctor, an’ “e did “is little tricks. I seen it with me own eyes, I tell you.”
Mrs Hamlyn did not speak. Pryce gave her a searching look.
“One of them Lascars on board, he’s a witch-doctor, same as the pawang that we “ave in the F.M.S. An’ “e says he’ll do it. Only he must “ave a live animal. A cock would do.”
“What do you want a live animal for?” Mrs Hamlyn asked, frowning a little.
The cockney looked at her with quick suspicion.
“If you take my advice you won’t know anything about it. But I tell you what, I’m going to leave no stone unturned to save my governor. An’ if the captain “ears of it and shuts me up in me cabin, well, let “im.”
At that moment Mrs Linsell came up and Pryce with his quaint gesture of salute left them. Mrs Linsell wanted Mrs Hamlyn to fit the dress she had been making herself for the fancy-dress ball, and on the way down to the cabin she spoke to her anxiously of the possibility that Mr Gallagher might die on Christmas Day. They could not possibly have the dance if he did. She had told the doctor that she would never speak to him again if this happened, and the doctor had promised her faithfully that he would keep the man alive over Christmas Day somehow.
“It would be nice for him, too,” said Mrs Linsell.
“For whom?” asked Mrs Hamlyn.
“For poor Mr Gallagher. Naturally no one likes to die on Christmas Day. Do they?”
“I don’t really know,” said Mrs Hamlyn.
That night, after she had been asleep a little while, she awoke weeping. It dismayed her that she should cry in her sleep. It was as though then the weakness of the flesh mastered her, and, her will broken, she were defenceless against a natural sorrow. She turned over in her mind, as so often before, the details of the disaster which had so profoundly affected her; she repeated the conversations with her husband, wishing she had said this and blaming herself because she had said the other. She wished with all her heart that she had remained in comfortable ignorance of her husband’s infatuation, and asked herself whether she would not have been wiser to pocket her pride and shut her eyes to the u
nwelcome truth. She was a woman of the world, and she knew too well how much more she lost in separating herself from her husband than his love; she lost the settled establishment and the assured position, the ample means and the support of a recognized background. She had known of many separated wives, living equivocally on smallish incomes, and knew how quickly their friends found them tiresome. And she was lonely. She was as lonely as the ship that throbbed her hasting way through an unpeopled sea, and lonely as the friendless man who lay dying in the ship’s lazaret. Mrs Hamlyn knew that her thoughts had got the better of her now and that she would not easily sleep again. It was very hot in her cabin. She looked at the time; it was between four and half past; she must pass two mortal hours before broke the reassuring day.
She slipped into a kimono and went on deck. The night was sombre and although the sky was unclouded no stars were visible. Panting and shaking, the old ship under full steam lumbered through the darkness. The silence was uncanny. Mrs Hamlyn with bare feet groped her way slowly along the deserted deck.
It was so black that she could see nothing. She came to the end of the promenade deck and leaned against the rail. Suddenly she started and her attention was fixed, for on the lower deck she caught a fitful glow. She leaned forward cautiously. It was a little fire, and she saw only the glow because the naked backs of men, crouched round, hid the flame. At the edge of the circle she divined, rather than saw, a stocky figure in pyjamas. The rest were natives, but this was a European. It must be Pryce and she guessed immediately that some dark ceremony of exorcism was in progress. Straining her ears she heard a low voice muttering a string of secret words. She began to tremble. She was aware that they were too intent upon their business to think that anyone was watching them, but she dared not move. Suddenly, rending the sultry silence of the night like a piece of silk violently torn in two, came the crowing of a cock. Mrs Hamlyn almost shrieked. Mr Pryce was trying to save the life of his friend and master by a sacrifice to the strange gods of the East. The voice went on, low and insistent. Then in the dark circle there was a movement, something was happening, she knew not what; there was a cluck-cluck from the cock, angry and frightened, and then a strange, indescribable sound; the magician was cutting the cock’s throat; then silence; there were vague doings that she could not follow, and in a little while it looked as though someone were stamping out the fire. The figures she had dimly seen were dissolved in the night and all once more was still. She heard again the regular throbbing of the engines.
The Complete Short Stories of W. Somerset Maugham - I - East and West Page 43
